Doug’s Blog

Archive for October, 2009

I have some old ReplayTV’s in use in my home setup, and sometimes they act up on me. The usual thing is they no longer are able to tune into the cable signal (“no video signal” errors).

Here are the steps I need to take to fix them:

1) Press the power button to turn the unit off.
2) Disconnect the RF coax cable from the back of the unit.
3) Unplug the unit’s power cord from the wall.
4) Reconnect the RF coax cable to the back of the unit.
5) Wait at least one minute.
6) Plug the unit’s power cord back in and allow it to boot up.
7) Enjoy flawless ReplayTV operation.

I’m configuring a new desktop setup for myself, using dual Nvidia 9600 GSO cards so I can hook up 3-4 monitors. I’ve been using Fedora more than other distros, so I wanted to stick with it for now (although I was tempted, after running into this issue, to jump to Ubuntu).

I had problems getting the DVD bootup to go into graphical mode, it kept showing an error that it couldn’t start X, and would continue with text mode. Of course, this is less than ideal since the text mode doesn’t have all the nice install options (not sure why) so I needed to figure it out.

The easy solution was to remove one of the cards and try again! This did the trick, and now I have Fed11 nicely running on the one card powering two monitors. Another thing to note is that I had to install Nvidia’s linux drivers. Also note, that if you run “yum update” after installing those drivers, you will need to re-install them one more time since yum will overwrite their functions.

My next step is to plug in the 2nd card and see if it is recognized properly and I can get 3 monitors going in independent configurations…

[Update] I added the second card after the fact, and now have 3 monitors hooked up nicely with no problems!

OK, here’s an odd one I encountered on one of my older servers running Apache2 and PHP 5.2.5

I had php scripts failing and generating “500” errors on the browser because they were running too long, or sometimes because a large file was being uploaded. I spent time playing with php.ini variables, only to find out that PHP wasn’t processing some of them!

Using phpinfo(), I noticed that the vars were not being set via php.ini, which I had set properly when it was compiled, ala: